attempt to create a permanent trading post on the island, but EIC vessels continued to visit ports in western Madagascar to provision their ships before sailing to India. By the mid-seventeenth century, the EIC expressed a particular interest in purchasing slaves from the island, particularly on the west coast, where, according to one English guide, “you need not doubt of meeting of slaves enough at some of these places.”215 One of the first English purchases of slaves in the southwestern Indian Ocean region was in 1639, when an EIC trader bought a shipment of slaves with cloth in the Comoro Islands.216 These slaves may have originated in northwestern Madagascar, a region the English frequently visited and described as connected with slaving in the Comoros. In 1644, for instance, an EIC captain observed “a junk” carrying five hundred slaves from Massaliege and sailing toward the Comoros.217 This and other similar observations of a preexisting traffic in captives on the west coast of Madagascar, as well as some luck in obtaining small cargoes of slaves, contributed to the English proposing that ships sent to Surat should stop and “buy up what slaves they can procure at St Laurence [Madagascar], Mozambique, Johanna [Ndzuwani] and the [Comoro] Islands.”218 The EIC issued orders in 1663 for several ships to visit the island of Madagascar, “either to the Eastward or westward of the island as . . . most advantageous and soonest gained . . . [and if to the west], sail for Masiladge [Massaliege], or any other place within judgment” to purchase thirty or forty slaves, aged from fifteen to twenty-one, for EIC settlements.219 The promise of the slave trade, as well as the continued pursuit of provisions, encouraged EIC visits to western Madagascar for slaves and provisions into the eighteenth century.220
PERSPECTIVES ON EUROPEAN IMPACT
The periodic arrival of Europeans in the ports of Madagascar during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has usually been dismissed as peripheral to European interests elsewhere in the ocean. The Portuguese cared more for gold in East Africa than rice from Madagascar, and paid the price.221 The Dutch wanted spices from Asia, cloth from India, and ebony from Mauritius, and much more, but only slaves from Madagascar.222 In a recent history of Madagascar, Stephen Ellis and Sofolo Randrianja argue that the island offered few exports that Europeans were interested in carrying long distances, other than slaves.223 But a focus on luxury goods and slaves ignores the need of fresh food and water that spurred European merchant fleets to spend weeks at a time on the shores of Madagascar in the middle of their transoceanic voyages, to say nothing of the multiple attempts to settle and convert the islanders by the mid-seventeenth century.
In the midst of the fantastic and speculative claims made by Europeans about Madagascar there are also the detailed descriptions of the islanders they encountered. Through European eyes, we primarily receive information about the commodities for sale on the shores of Madagascar. In the southern half of the island, cattle and citrus fruits were abundant, while the people of the north and east of Madagascar had rice for sale, but fewer cattle. The north was also home to a bustling slave trade. Food supplies were frequently limited and subject to disruption. Absent are the descriptions of royal ceremonial feasts that would be a hallmark of eighteenth-century trading rites. Our knowledge of seventeenth-century Madagascar is not only limited by the information that Europeans chose to record but also where they decided to visit. Merchants only halted at locations that offered secure harbors for sheltering their ships. These harbors usually were deep bays and river basins. Few vessels came to land directly to the north and south of St. Augustin Bay, for instance, so descriptions of these regions largely come from shipwrecked sailors.
It is clear that European trade networks, as shown in the experiences of Berblock or van der Spil, were secondary to those already operating within and around Madagascar throughout the seventeenth century. Slaves were reserved for East African and Arabian traders, not Europeans. Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century European trading records reveal that a ready market for Asian cloth already existed, as well as knowledge of its relative value, particularly in the north of the island. To the south, beads, firearms, and miscellaneous manufactured goods were more frequently used to purchase foodstuffs. The nuanced demand for certain colors and types of beads changed over time, from the red “rangoe” beads of the seventeenth century to the yellow glass beads requested during the eighteenth. The portability and durability of these forms of currency gave them higher demand in the south of the island and they may have been transported across trade routes stretching deep into the interior of the island before the seventeenth century.224
Work completed by prominent archeologists, including Robert Dewar, Chantal Radimilahy, and Henry Wright, confirms that communities throughout Madagascar had been connected through frequent migration and commerce for centuries prior to the arrival of Europeans on the island’s shores.225 Judging by the distribution of imported goods, merchants on the northwest coast traded (directly and indirectly) with a variety of groups throughout Madagascar by the thirteenth century. On an island of fluctuating rainfall and crop productivity, the ability to access and control food supplies may have contributed to political centralization by the sixteenth century. As agricultural communities in Madagascar’s interior produced more commodities for export, such as ironware, cloth, and other manufactured goods, they also supported leaders who could oversee these and other exchanges.226 Such economic and political changes have been noted throughout much of the island, even among the less populated pastoral communities in the south.227 There may have also been a population boom in the interior of the island as the first European ships began visiting Madagascar, although details are elusive.228
Thus island communities may have been in the midst of a major phase of reorganization just as the first Portuguese were arriving on their shores.229 Given these conditions, was the arrival of European merchants at the shores of Madagascar immediately transformational? Scholars have debated the importance of European intervention on communities along the shores of the Indian Ocean, but, by and large, most would agree with Abdul Sheriff who, along with others, concludes that the initial arrival of Europeans was less of a shock to the littoral societies of the Indian Ocean than it was to the economies of Europe.230 After all, Europeans not only competed with each other in these early years, but also faced challenges from other maritime and land-based powers.231 In Madagascar, Europeans needed to adapt to the economic conditions they encountered. Trade with Europeans in the northwest of the island was perhaps initially an outlet for surplus agricultural production that was already being accumulated for sale to African and Arab merchants. In the south of the island, by contrast, it would take an economic and political revolution for the people to secure dozens of bags of rice annually to sell to European merchants. Following this revolution, leaders could dictate the prices of the commodities they knew Europeans most needed. While European merchant groups introduced additional competition into trade in Madagascar, the real threat to coastal leaders did not come from these European visitors and colonists, but from populations elsewhere on the island.
THREE
The Sakalava
From Warriors to Merchants
THE ENGLISH VESSEL THE Sussex was returning from a visit to China in 1738 when strong winds suddenly tore apart the ship’s sails and damaged the mast. The crew panicked. Their commanding officers decided to board another English ship sailing in company with the Sussex, but sixteen men chose to stay on the damaged vessel.1 Four days after the departure of their officers, the remaining sailors sighted St. Augustin Bay. Upon entering the bay, the men signaled to the people on the shore to approach by hoisting a flag and firing several guns toward the beach. Two men, including a “linguester” (linguist) who could speak English, approached the vessel in a canoe. These newcomers brought with them a jar of honey, a present from the “King of Barbar.” The king’s representatives asked the captain to go ashore and visit with the king at his residence to the north, in the port of “Toliar.” They were informed that the king had just returned from war and had plentiful slaves and provisions for the Englishmen.
Despite this
